Look, IBM is doing SQL on Hadoop, too

Maybe this is just news to me, but IBM has a SQL-on-Hadoop product in the works called Big SQL. The company announced the technology preview version in March (well under my radar and, from what I’ve seen, nearly everyone else’s radar), and is offering up a cloud-based demo environment for a select group of early users.

As a refresher, the big difference between SQL on Hadoop and the Hadoop connectors that were popular a couple years ago is that SQL-on-Hadoop products query the data where it resides — in HDFS or HBase — rather than pulling it into a relational database environment to analyze it. We have been talking for months about the emergence of a large SQL-on-Hadoop market, but IBM’s name was conspicuously absent from that discussion. The company has Hadoop software called BigInsights and lots of SQL expertise, so it only made sense that IBM would get into…